Pt 2: Rev. Miak Siew: Being Gay in Society
Last week, we published the first part of Reverend Miak Siew’s interview with publichouse.sg. He talked about faith and sexuality, and why it is ok to be gay. Miak continues to spill his views. Over coffee and with the afternoon sun streaming through the windows of the restaurant we were in, he looks at what it means to be a gay man in society. The issues you have to contend with; the prejudices and the assumptions you face; the barriers that exist; the things that others take for granted which you cannot—that people who have not experienced may find hard to understand or even empathise with.
Liberated by disasters
Robin Low is a photographer who travels to disaster areas around the world to do his work. Here, he gives his views on what it is like to be on the ground and how he keeps himself going.
When a disaster happens, some people are burdened by the task of picking up the pieces caused by a force beyond their control, others are given a gift, a gift of being spared from the disaster. Some people take it for granted and do nothing, others may volunteer or donate.
Chew Joo Chiat - the King of Katong
The following article is the second in our series looking at the history of certain areas and road names in Singapore. Read the first article here: "Do you know? - Aljunied and Syed Alwi".
The famous Joo Chiat Road in the east coast of Singapore is named after Chew Joo Chiat (1857-1926) who was also known as the ‘King of Katong’. Chew was born in Fujian, China, to a farming family. He left for Singapore in 1877 to make a better life for himself and for his family back in China. The young man arrived in Singapore penniless but he had good business acumen and a willingness to work hard. The small business he started soon prospered.
In the early twentieth century, he bought land in the east coast of Singapore from the Alsagoff and Little families. He used the land for coconut plantations and for growing spices like nutmeg and gambier. Copra (the meat of the coconut) was a valuable cash crop; spices were in great demand by the Europeans.
The dirt track that ran through his plantation estate was called Confederate Estate Road and it was used by bullock carts. The Municipality in 1917 wanted to develop that dirt track into a motor road from the town to the beach, where Singapore’s rich had seaside bungalows. Chew knew that the motor road would make transportation of goods from the plantation easier and also increase the value of his land. Instead of selling the stretch of land to the Municipality, Chew donated it to them. The Municipality then named the road after him – Joo Chiat Road.
In the 1920s, Singapore’s population was increasing and people started to move out from the town area. Chew then parceled his land into building lots and sold it to developers. Peranakans started moving into Joo Chiat as the Telok Ayer area, where many stayed, was getting overcrowded. A few years later, the predominantly Catholic Eurasians also moved into Joo Chiat when a Catholic church and school were built. Joo Chiat became home to large Peranakan and Eurasian communities. Chew and his family lived in the Joo Chiat area too and after he died in 1926, he was known as the ‘King of Katong’.
S'pore's first fully ordained gay pastor
Miak Siew is a passionate and outspoken man. Just ordained at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, Miak is now a pastor at Free Community Church in Singapore. He preaches on Sundays and conducts programmes to reach out to the community. He is an advocate of social justice and feels strongly about issues concerning poverty and equality. He is big on compassion. He is also an LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) activitist and is open about his own sexuality.
Over multiple cups of coffees at a restaurant on a quiet weekday he talked to me at length about the many things that stir him.
“I think the gay issue is such a big thing in religion because people are wrestling with orthodoxy,” he explains. “The gay issue is a litmus test of who is orthodox and who isn’t. You see, the LGBT community was hidden in the past and so was an easy target for Christians to unite against. It became the bogey man. And it has been a very powerful way to garner support, raise money and unify groups of people who needed to prove that they were Christians. Part of my education and going away was to learn more about this and come back and say, well, this is a form of Christianity but it’s not Christianity.”
"My legs are now so tired and weak"
Lim, as she later told me her name was, is a frail-looking woman. The deep-set lines on her face, and the prominent sockets of her eyes, the paper-thin skin on her arms marked with liver spots or old age spots as they are sometimes called, and her severely hunched back tell a tale of struggle in making ends meet.
He stopped school to write a book
A few months ago, Nicholas Chan came into my life. A very special 15-year old boy, Nick is highly intelligent, very driven, confident and an out-of-the-box thinker. And, Nick had decided to make it on his own outside the Singapore school system. Mainstream education here, he told me over a pizza and coke at our first meeting, was doing little for him. He wasn’t learning, he wasn’t supported, he was going nowhere. So he was going to find success on his own. Be his own man. He had already informed his teachers that he was leaving school, and his mother was fully behind him.
EXCLUSIVE: Yaw Shin Leong - leading by example
“All credit goes to Mr Low Thia Khiang,” says the new Workers’ Party (WP) Member of Parliament (MP) for Hougang Single-Member Constituency (SMC), Mr Yaw Shin Leong. He was replying to this writer’s question about his victory in Hougang in the May general elections. “If not for the foundation which Mr Low has laid in the last 20 years [in Hougang], I don’t think I would be even talking about this type of percentage,” Mr Yaw says, referring to the 64.8 per cent winning margin over his rival from the People’s Action Party (PAP), Mr Desmond Choo in GE 2011.
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